Impact Of Technology On The Music Industry

Impact Of Technology On The Music attentionMusic labor has been most satisfyingly affected by such revolution of engineering during the past few decades. The most signifi stopt novelty in the euphony industry has undoubtedly been the digitalization of medicament. digital medication engine room has completely reassignd the underlying dynamics and economics of the melody industry. From while to period, this has been an issue of debate and has seen m some(prenominal) legal actions and sanctions (Matsuura, nd).Along with innovations in medicament engineering, the issue of piracy has become the single most challenging and heavy problem in the unison industry which has from time to time raised(a) serious concerns and warned of the consequences on the industry. Music piracy can be formally defined as some(prenominal) form of duplication along with statistical distri scarcelyion of music without the formal permission from the entity holding the right of commencement exer cise publications to that particular music. Directly interlinked with music piracy is the role of earnings and related phenomenon such as blame sharing or peer-to-peer sharing (P2P).profit growth and innovation are largely to be blamed and held responsible for the crisis in the music industry circles that affects its deuce-ace major buncoers including transcription companies, artists and consumers (Patokos, 2008). Not unaccompanied the music industry is facing losses but the quality of music is overly be by piracy.According to Hull (1998), the music industry profits from its three major revenue streamsPurchase of recorded music.Broadcasting recorded music. sedulousness for att blockadeing live performances.Here is the music industry vale mountain range as described in Meisel and Sullivan. (2002).The Music Industry survey strandSource Meisel et al. (2002), p.18.We all k instantly how easy it is to gain access to the trusty and copyrighted music through duplicated CDs an d shoot sharing (without paying any royalty to the owners of music) on internet (Bozina, Dumancic and Knezevic, 2007).Research PurposeThe major uptake of goods and services of carrying out this research is the importance of significant technological developments on the music industry circles and the ways in which issues such as copyright, authenticity, illegal fruit and distribution of music affect the various participants of the music industry circle.It go forth bring into focus the particular technological changes over the past 2 decades and evolution that has come to have-to doe with the way music is produced and distributed. It depart also help the readers understand the legal implications of the issue.Finally the research will check the major problem areas that threaten the music industry, particularly emphasizing on the revolution of MP3 technology and Compact Discs and it will conclude with numeric and qualitative analysis of the relevant variables that influence t he revenues of music industry.Research QuestionsIs the modern music industry suffering from pervasive effects of internet theft, piracy and flouting of copyright rules?How important it is to critically analyse the legal and technological implications of the MP3 technology on the business of music?Importance of ResearchThe issue of piracy needfully the special attention of industry and truth experts as we cannot let the phenomenon bide to wreck the music business.The MP3 effect influences the sales of music albums, though the law can spur legal actions in favour of ban the MP3 workout but it is not a practical solution.On the one end technology eases and improves the production and distribution of music and on the former(a) it should pass on the end listeners easy and cheaper access to high quality authentic music. sketch Literature ReviewUntil the 1990, music business was correctly anticipated but soon after this period, the forces shaping the business began to change. The fir st ever music cassette was introduced in 1963 by Philips. It became a very popular mode of diversion exploited by the car makers (Morton, 2004). The year of 1979 revolutionized by Sony which the first reach out held music player device. It came to be cognise as Sony Walkman (Thomas, 2006). Both Philips and Sony collaboratively brought in the most go on technology (still remains so with more mature variants such as DVD and Blu-Ray technology) called as Compact Discs (CDs) and the players subroutined to play the media cognise as CD players. By 1988, the CDs became the most popular technology for distributing music in standardized format which became universally accepted by the music industry and CDs outsell Long Playing record albums (LP) (University of Minnesota, 2008). The technology called Digital Audio Tape (DAT) was introduced by Sony the next year. It remained the most popular recording technology for professionals during the 1990s (Sony Group, 2010). The separate leader in tuneful innovation Philips launched Digital Compact Cassette to counter Sonys DAT technology.Sony shiftd the Mini criminal record (MD) in response to DCC. MD depictd with professional high quality recording to the professionals (Sony Group, 2010). The music was most dramatically distributed on the CDs and hence their use was most widespread. CDs were used by all of the major recording labels cod to persistent decrease in the prices of CDs (Sony Group, 2010). The following control panel 2.2 presents the change in the prices of CDs in the US music grocery between 1983 and 2006.Table 2.1. Decline in the prices of CDs from 1983 through 2006.Source RIAA, 2007The technology called CD- Recordable (CD-R) was introduced in 1990 and it was the first opportunity for the consumers to successfully duplicate the contents of the music albums without compromising on the quality of music and this allowed for piracy to be practised by consumers and other players such as illegal music uploa ding sites (OMalley, 1998). In US, 288 million CDs were sold only in one year, 1990 (Amoah, 2005). The role of computing and internet technology proved instrumental in spreading the crisis in the music industry. It was only in 1991 that computing devices came with the technology that played its users to play and listen to music. This development was attributed to Ad Lib and inventive Labs who introduced the technology of sound cards integrated into personal computers during manufacturing story (Dixon, 2010). It heightened the interest of consumers to reproduce the authentic contents on CDs, CD-Rs and more advanced recording media such as DVD and Blu-Ray.However the real stir was the introduction of the technology that made it possible to encode music as digital files on the computers, the most critical one was MPEG3 or MP3 (Motion effect Experts Group-1 Audio Layer 3). MP3 was introduced on 26 November 1996 (Belis, 2010). MP3 became so critical because it allowed users to crea te copies of music albums to near perfection. The fact that MP3 files could be terminald on computers and handled as any other file stored on it, the exchange of such music files was facilitated with an positive ease. With MP3 came the MP3 players to play them on standalone basis. Elger Labs was the first one to develop and commercially release the MP3 player known as MPman and was priced at whopping $250 only to store some eight songs. The revolution in MP3 players was brought about by Creative Labs in the year 2001 when it released an MP Player with much higher computer memory capability of 6 Gigabytes in comparison to MPman. But this was just a phase of development and it saw the launch of the worlds most foremost technology in MP3 players, it was the release of the device called IPOD by Apple (Menta, 2004). In todays time most of the youthfulness carry an MP3 player and IPOD remains the most pet among all the options available.The problem would not get aggravated if mp3 file s were restricted in the hands of individual users but the use of internet provided a chopine that allowed sharing of music through online modes. The pioneer of music sharing technology was a website known as Napster (Patokos, 2008). This was a platform for various internet users for sharing of music files stored on the computers hard drives between the users. This is known as peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing of files. Napster assumed profuse growth in P2P sharing market until it was successfully busted down by the enter Industry familiarity of the States (RIAA) in July 2000 with the help of judicial order (Riedel, 2006). The most late and devastating innovation in the recent years has been the illegal use of a collection of files known as torrents. These torrents are transferable through applications known as torrent downloader. There are sites such as despoiler Bay and BT Junkie which provide a collection of torrents downloadable by development applications such as Azureus and tor rent.The torrent era is most destructive because sharing is not confined to sharing of music files. Such sites are now being used for sharing anything from music files, audio books, movies, software and other miscellaneous files. It has almost become a social networking cult among the youth and value of such networks increases as they become larger and more panoptic. patch the RIAA was successful in cracking down Napsters services, they have been unsuccessful in preventing the expansion of torrent based programs as mentioned ahead in the report. Since the caprice of P2P the sale of physical CDs has been steadily declining every year (Powell and Smith-Doerr, 1994).Table 2.3 all the way represents the huge growth in the digital modes of music access and significant declines in the sales of physical music media. The newer and more devastating impact has been inflicted on music industry by applications like torrent downloaders as such networks differ from Napster like technology bec ause they do not depose on a single centralized server but the download is carried out by a user from various servers or seeding points/seeders. all the same the law becomes impotent in such situations because no single entity can be blamed for legal action.Manufacturers Unit Shipments and Retail Dollar ValueData CollectionThe data for the research will be self-possessed from the Consumer uptake Survey tables available from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. It is an extensive database which provides minute details about the buying habits of the US consumers, their income and various mansion characteristics. It also provides survey micro data for individual consumers demographic and use patterns (CES, 2010). I will also consult a range of websites for the utilisation of collecting avouchation and statistics related to the music industry.Music industry websites- The Nielsen Company, www.soundscan.com, Recording industry Association of America, http//www.riaa.com, Sony Music, http//www.sonymusic.co.uk, Universal, http//www.universalrecords.com, Warner Brothers Music, http//www.warnerbros.com/music.Audio technology sites- Diamond, http//www.diamonthrun.com, Microsoft, http//www.microsoft.com, Music Match, http//www.musicmatch.com, Real Networks, http//www.real.com.Internet industry sites- Amazon, http//www.amazon.com, CD Baby, http//www.cdbaby.com, Emusic, http//www.emusic.com, MPEG, http//www.cselt.it/mpeg/, Napster, http//www.napster.com.Broadcast sites- BBC, http//www.bbc.co.uk, Broadcast.com, http//www.broadcast.com, Cyberville Radio, http//www.cyberville.co.uk.Marketing sites- ViralMarketers.com, http//www.viralmarketer.com, Musicpromotion.net, http//www.musicpromotion.net.Another major database that I will gain access to is the comprehensive statistical analysis known as the Shipment Statistics Database available from The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). I will need to contact RIAA through email to inform then regarding them my proj ects vital features and they will decide whether to permit access to the database. In the event of permission not being granted I will subscribe to it by paying a nominal fee (RIAA, 2010) methodologyThis particular research work will focus on utilizing a research model that enables to exploit the benefits of methods such as qualitative analysis through behavioural questionnaire and interviews with the industry experts. Since the research fundamentally proposes that MP3 CDs and internet file sharing technologies impact the sales of original works of music. It is important to handgrip in mind the argument that such facilities decreased the CDs sales.To effectively get over with this question of importance, I will collect micro-level data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) available from the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS). It will certainly provide the answer to the debatable question whether file sharing has decreased the CDs sales figures. Similar studies have been ca rried out by experts such as Liebowitz (2004).I will also examine the connection between ownership of computers by households and figures for expenditures on music. It will help me analyse whether increase in computer ownership increases file sharing by consumers and subsequent decreases CD sales. therefrom this study will constitute a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the mentioned research questions.Is there a solution?The diagram 5.1 downstairs proposes the possible go-ahead for the music industry to survive profitably in the coming future. The first file sharing site, Napster was legally challenged in the court and was finally forced to shut down its illegitimate activity.Source Bized, (nd).